Biography Geoffrey Grigson

Poet Biography

The seventh and last son of an elderly clergyman from Pelynt in Cornwall, Grigson escaped a career with Colman's mustard to turn his hand variously to school teaching, journalism, broadcasting, radio monitoring (during the second world war), and radio production.

Few British writers of the twentieth century have inspired such resentment as Geoffrey Grigson. As editor of the dogmatic poetry journal New Verse in the 1930s, he championed the likes of Auden and Macneice, but at the same time made unshakeable enemies through a fiercely passionate critical ideal that he was later to describe, a little ruefully, as a 'billhook' which he would take to the pompous, the inflated, the egotistical, anything he viewed as being worthlessly retrograde, empty word-play or socio-political posturing.

Grigson's fierce polemic obviously made difficulties for the easy acceptance of his own work, for as well as his essays and articles, compelling and convincing though they often are, Grigson was a poet of considerable thoughtfulness and colour in his own right, publishing thirteen volumes of work from 'Several Observations' in 1939 to the posthumous 'Persephone's Flowers' in 1986.

His worldview is clearly evident in the enthusiasms he championed: brightly burning poets of the countryside such as John Clare; visionary artists from Samuel Palmer to his contemporaries and friends, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, John Piper, Wyndham Lewis. Grigson revelled in finding the extra-ordinary in the seeming ordinariness of a rural life that twentieth century short term thinking was beginning to eradicate. Flora, fauna and rural lore were presented in inspirational compendia and essay collections such as the Shell Country Book, The Englishman's Flora, Freedom of the Parish and the Shell Country Alphabet. For the Festival of Britain in 1951 he edited the series of About Britain guides, penning the text of the volumes on Wessex and the West Country.

Grigson also wrote books to lead children into an appreciation of the countryside, poetry and the visual arts; later he became an 'anthologist's anthologist', with a seemingly endless train of collections of epigrams and epitaphs, nonsense verse, 'unrespectable' verse. He revealed much light to be found in apparently dark and (at that time) neglected and disdained periods of literary history, the Romantics, the Victorians. He revived interest in forgotten poets such as William Diaper.

He was married three times; his first wife was killed by tuberculosis just before the second world war, and a mere handful of years before the disease became more curable. The second marriage ended in divorce. The third was to (in writer Jane Gardam's words) ' a large easy-going girl who wore tweeds and never worried about a thing', and lasted the rest of his life: this was Jane Grigson, later well known in her own right as a cookery writer. Jane 'ruined my figure, and saved my soul', according to her husband.

Geoffrey Grigson died in 1985, writing poetry until the very last. The posthumous volume of poetry Persephone's Flowers ends, not with a mellow portrait of peaceful resignation, but instead Grigson and his nurse 'who had promised him that his death - which he knew to be near - would be easy, not the anguish of destruction he anticipated'.